


well, shit.

by alittlecryptic



Series: well, shit. [1]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mobfell (Undertale), Alternate Universe - Underfell (Undertale), Angst, Big Brother W. D. Gaster, Brief mentions of murder, Brief mentions of suicide, Crimes & Criminals, Detectives, Gen, Good W. D. Gaster, I hope, Judge Sans (Undertale), Mentions of Organized Crime, Mentions of drugs, Nonbinary Frisk (Undertale), Organized Crime, Papyrus gets into deep shit, Prejudice Against Monsters (Undertale), Sans is Not Okay (Undertale), Selectively Mute Frisk (Undertale), Underfell Sans (Undertale), Undertale Monsters on the Surface, dw it’ll have a happy ending, kind of?, this is gonna be fun lmao
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-06
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-18 13:41:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29244480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alittlecryptic/pseuds/alittlecryptic
Summary: Papyrus has been missing for the past five months. Sans has been trying to find him, but without any promising leads, he’s starting to think the worst.Until a new lead draws his interest like a blood trail for a wolf.
Relationships: Alphys & Papyrus (Undertale), Alphys & Sans (Undertale), Frisk & Sans (Undertale), Papyrus & Sans (Undertale), Sans & Toriel (Undertale), W. D. Gaster & Papyrus & Sans, W. D. Gaster & Sans
Series: well, shit. [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2147340
Comments: 5
Kudos: 12





	well, shit.

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings at the end! Hmu if I missed anything.

Five months.

It doesn’t seem that long. In reality, it isn’t. For any normal person, it’s a beautiful day outside. Birds are singing, flowers are blooming, blah, blah, blah.

But Sans isn’t what you’d call a normal person.

_That’s a lie. Anyone would think he’s a normal person. Some tired hotdog vendor that tells great(see: awful) jokes. No one even knows he’s the Judge._

_No one but his brother—_

Five months. No sign of Papyrus. Sans’ had nothing but dead ends for the past month and a half, trying to find him( _trying to prove he’s not dust)._ Lately, he’s just been getting the same old pitying looks. At least no one lies to him anymore, saying Papyrus will be back soon.

_Not a lie, technically, because Papyrus isn’t dead. He’s not._

His eyes are blurry from too much reading and too little sleep. There’s a headache that throbs with each weary beat of his soul, and the sun shining in the cloudless sky isn’t helping much. 

Blearily, he raises his head, wiping at a line of drool that dried on his face long ago. Judging(ha) by how high in the sky the sun is, Sans would wager that it’s probably around 11. Maybe 12. He doesn’t really care. One of his bosses took one look at him yesterday shuffling into his office and told him to go home, that he should rest. He didn’t fight that much. He tells himself it’s because he’s exhausted.

He spent the night looking over the details in Papyrus’ file anyway, trying to find loopholes, something, _anything_ he might have missed concerning the disappearance of his brother. He passed out at his desk anyway, his body forcing him to slow the fuck down.

Now, with the weekend here, he’s got two whole days of sleeping to do if he wanted. Catch up on the past five months of him frantically trying to find Papyrus, then trying to prove he’s not dead, then quietly trying to find him while his friends went through sharp grief before it petered out into something manageable.

_His head hurts. He can’t remember the last time he took a shower. He can’t remember the last time he’s eaten._

_He thinks of Papyrus, a flashbulb image of when he was still in stripes._

He looks back at the mess of papers and files, newspaper clippings and a sharpie that’s running out of ink. If he had a stomach, he’s pretty sure it would be growling, but since it’d be pretty weird for a skeleton monster to have any sort of organs, the only thing he feels is the dull ache in the back of his skull and the fizzing of his magic, his joints dulled down to a dusty blue.

He needs to fucking eat.

He gets out of his chair, grimacing at the stiffness of his bones and the ray of sunlight hitting him in the face. He squints his eyes, turning away and walking out of his room. He eyes the door to his brother’s room, closed off from the world. It’s kind of uneasy, the still quiet of the house. Sometimes he still expects to hear the thunder of Papyrus’ boots against the hardwood floor as he rushed out of the door, because he somehow was always late in getting to the police station.

He’d say it was because the dog got it’s white hair all over his uniform(he can attest to how hard it is to get it out of his own clothes, it’s a nightmare), but Sans could usually hear Paps making him breakfast while he dozed in and out of sleep in the mornings, the dog snoozing on Paps’ bed whenever Sans got his sorry ass up to eat before Paps left for work. 

Now, with Paps missing, there’s no one to make Sans breakfast. Brunch? Whatever. It’s truly tragic, having to take care of himself.

When he gets downstairs, the dog is sitting on the couch. It wags its tail at the sight of him, and Sans can’t help but grin at the squeaky yip it emits as it launches itself at the couch, even if it adds to the headache he’s got going on. Turns out the happiness of dogs is contagious. 

Sans gives a tired “heh” and bends down to scritch between the dog’s ears. “Hungry, huh?” The dog yips again. “Yeah, me too.”

He makes sure to feed the dog first, because he’s not cruel. It doesn’t even actually wait for Sans to finish pouring the food into its bowl, cramming its head in to eat what’s in it and leaving the rest to pour over its head. Some of it goes onto the floor. Sans doesn’t bother cleaning it up. Dog’ll probably get it anyway, and if it doesn’t, well. No one to scold him for brushing the pieces of kibble under the fridge.

Sans goes through the motions of making ramen, because it’s the easiest to do and he’s a lazy bastard. 

By the time he’s done scarfing it down, the headache is gone(fortunate) and replaced by a weary tiredness that’s as much his body as it is his mind(less fortunate, but bearable), both parts of a broken machine that’ve been overworked for too long. The sun is still a few hours away from slipping behind the line of trees and buildings, but Sans finds himself trudging towards his room again(after putting his dishes in the dishwasher, which is, honestly, a technological miracle).

The rest of the house is stale and, well… still. It’s like it’s empty, now, without life. Kind of like some weird shell of what it was before Papyrus disappeared off the face of the earth.

The quiet stillness of the house means Sans doesn’t have much to interrupt the constant background noise of his thoughts, which is unfortunate because he doesn’t really want to think right now. Or ever. 

He enters his room again, and his phone beeps on the nightstand where he’d left it last night, but his mind is already ticking away. He pays it no mind.

Dark. It was dark when Alphys knocked on his door. Papyrus had busted some drug ring a month before; turns out the seedy underbelly of Ebony was more vast than the police department had expected, because the drug ring wasn’t the work of some gang of young and stupid teenagers trying to make a name for themselves. It was big.

Papyrus was sharp. Where the other officers saw nothing, he saw everything that was happening. (It’s the main reason he became a detective instead of an officer.) Sans was worried for him when he started going out in the field, because that mind of his was too sharp for a small city like Ebott. It was like trying to get a pointer dog to be content with being slow and lazy; it just wasn’t going to happen.

With those smarts, Sans knew it was only going to be a matter of time before Papyrus got himself into trouble. But he also knew that Papyrus wasn’t a pushover; when it came down to it, he was one of those people you wanted at your side when you were getting into a fight.

Sans let Papyrus go off the leash, and like a hunting dog following a blood trail, Papyrus started to find more and more evidence that something was pulling some serious strings in their quiet little city, diving in head first without a second thought.

When he busted the drug ring, Sans thinks that that was when the gang (Mafia? Mob? Whatever it is.) started to take notice of Papyrus. He knew it was inevitable, but even _he_ didn’t realize how much Papyrus had stirred up until he opened the door to Alphys instead of his brother, nervous as a deer and stuttering like a broken record. 

Sans invited her in, like a good host, naturally, even as the magic along his spine prickled and the judge murmured warnings in the back of his head that something was wrong(like he’d needed a warning anyway). He thought he knew what she was going to say, but he wonders if the words _he’s dead_ would have been better than _he’s missing_. Maybe it is, even if he tells himself it’s not.

The next few weeks that followed are kind of a blur, even though Sans can recall things he learned back in college with terrifying ease. The entire department sent out to find his brother, calls being made, connections checked and rechecked, leads followed up on and dropped like litter on the highway.

Sans is no detective, but he tried his damndest to find Papyrus. He’s unassuming, easygoing, friendly. He knows he can make people drop their guard without them even knowing.

Being a judge helps, too, he thinks.

The queen doesn’t call upon him much. They both know the stories of judges offing themselves or committing mass judgements that resulted more often than not in deaths when they lost control. (When the judge took control.) Hell, the queen _lived_ some of those stories. It’s the sole reason she only calls upon him when it’s cases of murder against monsters, or when it involves kids.

He thinks that’s why it surprised her( _and him_ ) when he asked to judge the mob members Papyrus had busted. 

His phone pings again. He ignores it.

One of the guys didn’t know anything. Some young human that went in too deep and was paying the price for it, but he weeped when it was done and the judge revealed everything he had done.

The other, though…

_“I don’t know nobody named Papyrus, s-sir, but, uh. I think I seen someone like him around. Beat up bad. But I don’t… don’t know nothin’ else. I’ll swear on it, sir. Don’t know if he’s alive or anything. But, uh, if he’s the one that’s been stirrin’ stuff up… I ain’t gonna be surprised if the fellas see how smart he is. But I don’t know, uh… if they’ll do anything else to ‘im.”_

It’s the only thing keeping Sans going so far.

(He’s terrified of Papyrus turning into another Dings.)

(He won’t. Sans won’t let it happen.)

( _But what if—_ )

The phone pings again, and this time Sans looks at it. It’s charged to full battery(probably been like that for a few hours), so Sans takes it off the charger(and bumping some newspaper clippings off of the nightstand, whoops) and opens it, sits on the bare mattress he calls a bed, expecting to see some new texts from some acquaintance or other—

Three new messages from the queen’s kid.

He remembers the day after Papyrus was missing like most people remember something from childhood: foggy, impressions of emotions and blurry faces, but there’s one thing that’s crystal clear.

If Papyrus was determined, then Frisk was twice as determined as he was. 

He remembers the moment he told Frisk what happened to Papyrus. He kind of expected the kid to cry, because they and Papyrus got along like wood and fire. (Sometimes literally.) 

And that was kind of the case. He saw the moment Frisk was gut-punched by raw shock and something like not-quite-grief and not-quite-sadness. He was expecting that.

What he didn’t expect was for the kid to set their jaw and furrow their brow, and then, when the queen turned her back, quietly whispered to him in that raspy, unused voice of theirs.

“ _I’ll help you find him_.”

And Sans saw that they meant it, too, because he knows how much it kills their throat when they actually speak. It’s the main reason they stick to sign language. Having them talk to him means how serious they are, and he remembers the relief sighing out of him at that statement.

_At that promise._

Frisk might be the only one who still believes that Papyrus is still out there, unless Alphys and the queen are such good liars to him(and to themselves) that even a judge can’t tell.

Frisk is good at finding leads for Sans to follow up on. They’re unassuming, good at playing the innocent kid that’s friends with everyone. 

Most of the leads that Sans followed up on were from the kid, and a lot of them were promising, even if they didn’t lead up to much. Turns out the mob is more careful than he thought.

(That’s fine. Let them hide. They’re not what he’s after anyway.)

He opens up the messages.

The world slows down for a second when he reads the short sentences the kid sent him before it goes into crystal clear focus again. He’s on alert now, smelling blood in the water.

_at grillby’s_

_new lead on papyrus_

_you coming?_

He glances at the mirror Papyrus bought him. There’s dark circles under his eyes and he kind of looks like he stayed up for three nights in a row studying for a midterm, but he’s not passing this up. It’s the first lead they’ve found in weeks.

He texts a quick _on my way_ before he gets up, tossing his phone back on his mattress. 

( _Please don’t let this be a dead end_ , he thinks. Maybe it’s more of a prayer than a thought, actually, but either way he hopes that it’s gonna put him on a path that leads to Papyrus.)

He gets some clothes that don’t stink of sweat and aren’t coated with grease stains and heads to the bathroom to splash some cold water in his face, because when you’re following up on the disappearance of your brother caused by a mob, you can’t really go in looking like hell. It puts people at unease, makes him look desperate. Crazy, even.

He’s gotta play his cards right. He can’t risk losing this blood trail that might lead him to Papyrus.

He’s going to find him. He swears it.

He’s not letting what happened to Dings happen to Papyrus. He _can’t_.

He makes sure to grab his phone, give the dog a goodbye scritch(because again, he’s not cruel), and text a quick _I’m here_ to the kid when he’s not looking like five kinds of hell before he tears open a shortcut into the alley beside Grillby’s.

**Author's Note:**

> Mentions of drugs, organized crime; everyone thinks Papyrus is dead except for Sans and Frisk. Sans isn’t taking care of himself which could be a form of self-harm. Mentions Dings(Gaster) disappearing like Papyrus. Sans is slightly obsessed with finding Papyrus/trying to prove he’s not dead. Briefly mentions previous judges losing control and either committing suicide or mass murder.
> 
> Edit: Corrected some punctuation issues, which reminded me why you should proofread before posting your work;;


End file.
